1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus for creating variable print data to be output to an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-342039 discloses an image forming system in which frequently used data (master data) is registered in an image forming apparatus and in which data that can vary (variable data) is sent to the image forming apparatus later. The image forming system also has a function for merging the master data and the variable data and printing merged data.
The printing function is a function for printing a combination of an image corresponding to a background called master data and data called variable data (such as ornamental letter data and photographic image data). A combination of the master data and the variable data is referred to as an “image resource”.
Actually, a plurality of image resources contained in records in a database are arranged to form different images depending on the content of the individual records.
In this case, desirably, the image resources are cached on a memory incorporated in the image forming system and can be processed at a high speed. In reality, however, the memory size available for caching has a limitation in terms of hardware or cost.
Accordingly, if the image resources cannot be held in a memory cache, the image resources are generally held in a secondary storage medium such as a hard disk.
However, this involves processes for writing created data into the secondary storage medium and reading the data into the memory from the secondary storage medium. Thus, a considerable processing time is required.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-226465 discloses a cache efficient use technique in which data is divided into records so that the records are arranged in descending order starting from the record having the highest degree of overlap with respect to a reference record and in which printing is performed using a plurality of devices. Thus, a specific device successively processes records containing the same image resource to achieve high efficiency. To this end, it is assumed that the printing order may or may not be important in variable printing depending on the case. For example, when concert tickets are numbered, the printing order is important.
Direct mail printing, on the other hand, would not be much affected by changing the printing order even though the mailing order is changed. The technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-226465 is effective for the latter case.
In the techniques of the related art described above, however, the selection of a reference record and the number of divisions greatly affect the process efficiency.
Therefore, optimization of variable print data in the related art based on the similarity to a reference record may not always produce a beneficial result.